uberpenguin

Well, I think it's useful to have an introduction to functional languages, and Scheme is about the most simple and clean (read: minimalistic) functional language I know of. I think I'd make an eternal enemy if I suggested he learned Common Lisp. -uberpenguin

Ehhh... Pfft.. Nevermind. You assume (just like the rest of the young Mac-loving world) that switching to x86 means that Apple can't still maintain tight control over their platform. x86 doesn't automatically mean IBM compatible (though it remains to be seen whether or not x86 Macs will in fact be IBM compatibles; right now it sort of looks that way. It's not that difficult for them to say that Mac OS X for x86 is only supported on x86 Macs, not any other PC (and they've already more or less said that). Sure hackers will have their fun, but they hardly expect service and support from Appl

There are always the top-down and the bottom-up approaches to teaching programming. C or C++ really should be taught from a bottom-up approach, meaning you need to know just a little about computer architecture to fully grasp what's going on. If you're just trying to understand C without any prior knowledge regarding "how computers work" (no, "pushing 1s and 0s" isn't enough prior knowledge), I think you'll eventually get badly hung up on pointer arithmetic or type casting (or a combination of) somewhere down the line. I mean, no offense to anyone, but you'll find that writing "Hello world"

That AIM build is several years dated and is linked against an ancient version of glibc... It would be far more trouble to get it to work than to simply use GAIM (which really is better anyways). -uberpenguin

Negating electromigration (which isn't a trivial case, but it has yet to be a really major problem at the current densities most modern ICs see), electrical load doesn't really cause cumulative wear on ICs. It's often argued that the expansion and contraction of the IC as it heats and cools can cause structural damage over time, however the change in temperature of most ICs is fairly slow and gradual and I've seen several devices almost 3 decades old that still work reliably (if you keep your current PC in consistant use for another 30 years, I'm impressed). CPU's "burn out" when, as some oth

Numbers 1, 2, and 3 aren't actually useful security measures. Number 2 generally turns out to be more a nuisance than a help. Number 1 is nothing more than cosmetic. You've done a pretty reasonable level of access restriction for a home wireless network, I wouldn't worry about it too much now. -uberpenguin

Electron migration has only become significant fairly recently. Perhaps counter-intuitively, older MOS and even TTL circuits aren't really going to be affected by electron migration. I'm not sure what you mean by 'voltage leakage...' If you're referring to subthreshold voltage leakage I still don't see what you're getting at. I've personally used digital equipment that was manufactured in the mid-70s that still works just fine. Generally in computers that old, the things that go first are power supply components like the big electrolytic caps. Sometimes some of the TTL components like a f

Linux is a Free *nix macrokernel that is developed at a frantic pace, has a lot of support and developers, and a healthy dose of industry support. If none of that means anything to you, then the best benefit is that it is simply "a different OS." We could get into very technical details of how it excells and falls behind various other OSes, but that's almost certainly not what you want.

Too late. Again, you're just arguing semantics. If you want to call the first router owned by your ISP an 'access point' because you access the Interweb through it, you are welcome to. Most people associate the term AP with 802.11, though.

You are confusing network layers. IP routing concerns a level or two above 802.11. Any physical/data link implementation that supports IP can be used for IP routing. Most home networking cards like the one the OP mentioned don't even support 802.11 Master mode, so you really couldn't use it as an AP even if you get your OSI model issues worked out. This is just a matter of semantics, but IP routers are almost always called "routers" and "gateways," not "access points." The latter is usually used as an 802.11 term in these contexts. It contains big chunks of metal, which certainly have an

Something that has the ability to make babies and 50-year-old Bell Unix hackers cry. -uberpenguin

CC would have a cow (pun not intended). The PCI 802.11 radio in your PC does not function as an access point in most home networks (if it does you either did something wrong or already know enough not to ask a question like this). In reality these 'wireless home broadband routers' are actually a router/gateway/NAT/DHCP server/802.11 AP all rolled into one package. They just call it a router to help save on the confusion for people who just want to use their interweb wirelessly. If the "router" is advertised as being a "wireless router," then you can be sure it contains an access point and y

No, but being very knowledgeable about OS/400 does. -uberpenguin

Allow me to disagree with the venerable Leo. That kind of thinking leads you to the mentality that gives rise to wonderful humorous fodder for sites like funroll-loops.org. I have my own theories on the best ways to 'learn how computers work,' but that wasn't the intent of this thread. Don't start out with unreasonable expectations; Linux is not really inherently any more or less secure than a properly administered NT box. Notice the operative phrase in that sentence: "properly administered." In most noteworthy cases computer security is the merit or the fault (whatever the case may be) o

HP LaserJet 1012... Sorta recommend it... Works well when it works but it acts funky sometimes, even when printing from my Win2k machine. I used to have an HP LaserJet 1300, which I HIGHLY recommend, but I had to give it back. -uberpenguin

/me laments the selling off of the Thinkpad division; it made some of the best Linux and BSD compatible laptops... -uberpenguin

Using a late XFce4 CVS... I wrote a lot more information on this matter here -uberpenguin

hitest, It's mostly a DRI issue with the radeon driver. They were having similar issues with the rage128 driver, but it was fixed in an update. If you turn off DRI the problems will stop. Right now I have DRI enabled and only see a problem once in a while, which I can more or less live with. -uberpenguin

I've actually had similar problems; DRI has several bugs in the current Xorg release, especially the ATI drivers... A nasty bug was just fixed for the rage128 module that kept it from freeing interrupts (leading to a machine hard lock). It looks like the radeon DRI code has a similar problem, but it isn't fixed yet... Oh well, I can live without DRI for awhile, especially since I used a dirty hack for the kernel radeonfb module to get it to play nicely with ACPI suspend/resume... 1024x768x16bpp console is MUCH nicer than 80x25 -uberpenguin

I didn't say how MUCH less piggish it is now, but it has definitely gotten better. ESPECIALLY in the speed department. ``Audio catalogue?'' Hmm... I haven't used Nautilus for 2.8 too heavilly, I'll have to look at that. -uberpenguin

Hmm... I've been through a bunch. WAY back, I used GNOME (pre-1.0) for awhile and remember being very frustrated when the first GTK+ apps were ported to GTK2 because my themes didn't match any more GNOME and I parted ways and I didn't look back for awhile, especially after the Sawmill WM was replaced by Havoc Pennington's Metacity (what GNOME uses today), which is quite limited and feature-lacking compared to Sawmill. This more or less was at the outset of the big simplification movement for GNOME. After I got angry that GMC was replaced by Nautilus in GNOME (back then it was even more a r

Yes, then there's the occasional thread in which some kid decides to try and impress everyone else by using terminology that goes over most peoples head, but manage to bastardize what they are trying to say anyway... Usually about computer architecture, basic electronics, `hacking' (script kiddie style), or cluster computing in which a certain poster copied half of a paper by a research scientist at U of T. I only stuck around because of some of the other old TSS board regulars. -uberpenguin

No, no surprises here... Just FYI. -uberpenguin

Hey all, I just wanted to post notifying you that The Screen Savers; formerly of TechTV, formerly of ZDTV, has been scheduled for `major revamping.' This basically means the last ZDTV-days characters have been fired (Yoshi and some producers), most of the current staff is being shuffled around, and the show is being given an even newer focus. As to what that is can only be speculated at, but I don't think it's totally unreasonable to guess it will be gamer-lifestyle oriented. http://www.kevinrose.com/index.php/weblog/comments/131/ Just wanted to let those of you who are old ZDTV faithful kno

Take option 3: Plan-9! -uberpenguin